


Full of Surprises (You're One of Them)

by flipflop_diva



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst and Humor, Awesome Natasha Romanov, Awesome Sam Wilson, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov Friendship, F/M, Friendship, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Relationship, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-24
Updated: 2016-05-24
Packaged: 2018-06-10 11:42:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6955093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flipflop_diva/pseuds/flipflop_diva
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It started as a joke. Sneaking into various rooms in Sam's place, just to get a reaction out of him. It was all fun and games — until it wasn't. (Set between TWS and Civil War.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Full of Surprises (You're One of Them)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shinealightonme](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinealightonme/gifts).



> Written as a gift for shinealightonme. The prompts I had to work with were amazing, but I had the hardest time coming up with a good plot — and then this kind of happened. I hope you enjoy it, shinealightonme!

The first time started as a joke.

Actually, no. The first time started because she couldn’t find Steve and she was desperate and she knew that Sam would know where he was. She also knew that she couldn’t just sit in front of his door and wait for him like she didn’t have anything else to do — her appearance before Congress had made her much too recognizable and it also had made her too much of a target. Too many people from her past now knew where she was.

So she did what she always did and jimmied the lock on the back door and slipped inside. She was drinking a cup of coffee with her feet up on the kitchen table when Sam walked in, saw her and promptly dropped the bag of groceries he was carrying.

“Jesus, Natasha! What the hell?” He stared at her, half in horror, half in shock.

She merely pointed to an egg now rolling across the kitchen floor, remarked “You might want to catch that” and put the file with the new lead she’d gotten on Bucky down on the table.

“I have a door!” he called to her ten minutes later as she slipped out a window — this time for kicks, not because there was anything at all wrong with his front door. “Next time use it!”

“Nope!” she called back, and then she was gone.

After that, every time she did it really was just for fun. Because the look on Sam’s face, and the sight of eggs and canned vegetables and a bottle of orange juice rolling across the kitchen floor, had been too delicious to not try to recreate. Or to top.

Of course, she mixed it up. One night he came home to find her asleep on the couch with the TV on. Another time she was trying (and maybe failing) to cook him dinner. A third time she slipped into the passenger seat of his car, her feet up on the dashboard, a stick of bubblegum in her mouth and waited for him to come out to go to work at the V.A.

Each time was better than the last.

“Damn it, Natasha,” he said, the morning he walked into the bathroom, shirtless and sleepy-eyed, to find her sitting cross-legged on the counter. “You’re going to give me a heart attack one of these days.”

“That’s the plan,” she said, and smiled a little too enthusiastically.

“You’re a mean woman. Has anyone told you that? Because they should have told you that.”

She shrugged. “You get use to it.”

As soon as the words left her mouth, she realized what she’d said — and more importantly how she’d said it. Definitely not with enough jovialness, judging by the way his expression faltered, the usual amusement replaced for a moment by something else, as thought he was trying to decide if she was being serious or not. She reached out, touched his arm, tried to break the tension. 

“You gonna make me breakfast?” she said, and she made sure to bat her eyelashes for effect. “I didn’t come all this way to just sit here.”

He rolled his eyes and swatted her with a towel (but he did, in fact, make her breakfast and he didn’t bring back up her accidental admittance of vulnerability, for which she was more than grateful).

She kept it up, her random drop ins on Sam, for months, even after she and Steve moved back to New York and into the Tower with the other Avengers. It was harder to slip away, but stealth and covert operations were who she was and it was fun to use her skills for something that wasn’t life and death. 

Her particular favorite was the time she slipped into bed with Sam in the middle of the night and let him wake up in the morning with his arms wrapped around her, her head tucked neatly under his chin.

Sure, she was forced out of a peaceful dream by a firm whack on the head with a pillow and she scowled as he pulled the blankets away and a rush of cold air swept over her, even as Sam told her she didn’t deserve any warmth when she pulled stunts like that, but the way he just kept shaking his head at her for the rest of the morning, like he didn’t quite have the words, made it all so very worth it.

Or at least it was worth it until she was repeating the story to Clint the next day, expecting him to compliment her on her skills, but instead he just stared at her like she had told him she was part alien.

“Oh my god, Nat, do you like Sam?” 

“What?” Natasha almost choked on the bite of burger she had in her mouth. 

“You _do_!” Clint said, and he lifted his finger to point at her like the evidence was right there on her face. (Which it wasn’t. It most definitely wasn’t. She hadn’t blushed unintentionally since she was twelve years old, so there was no way the warmth she felt was that. Besides, Sam was her friend. A buddy. A colleague. A friend she supposed. She liked him, of course she did, but she didn’t _like_ him.)

“You are insane,” she told Clint, and batted his hand away. His pointing was unnerving. “And you’ve been spending too much time watching The Bachelor.”

“I don’t watch The Bachelor,” he protested. “Laura turns it on. I just don’t change the channel.”

Natasha hummed under her breath. “That’s not the story she tells.” Clint kicked her beneath the table, and Natasha grinned. But at least the conversation had turned away from Sam.

•••

The random drop-ins became less frequent after that. If Sam noticed, he didn’t say anything. (It did occur to her that maybe he was glad they were less frequent, but she pushed that thought, and the sting it gave her when she thought it, out of her head almost immediately.)

She spent her time focusing on other stuff instead — training with the team, taking down Hydra bases, maybe flirting a little with Bruce. (What? She reasoned to herself. He was a much better match for her than someone like Sam, who had no idea of what she had done in her past.)

And then Ultron happened and Thor left and Tony went back to Pepper and Clint went home and suddenly she and Sam were living together. At least geographically speaking. Their rooms weren’t that far apart, and she did usually race him to the orange juice every morning, mostly just to smirk at the look of defeat on his face every single time.

“I don’t like you,” he told her one morning as she raised the orange juice above her head in triumph.

“Nah, you love me,” she grinned, and then froze, hearing the words as they left her mouth.

Sam, for his part, just shook his head at her and rolled his eyes, and she slumped off to the gym after that for practice, half hating herself for wishing that moment had gone differently.

She stopped racing him for the orange juice after that. In fact, she stopped spending time with him if at all possible. She knew it was stupid (she didn’t even _like_ him. Except she did. And she knew it, and she was afraid other people knew it too, and it was stupid because she was who she was and who she was was not a girl anyone dates. Especially a guy like Sam), but she couldn’t help it. She also knew everyone else had noticed.

“Are you and Sam …. In a fight or something?” Steve asked her one morning as they strapped on gear to get ready to practice.

Natasha schooled her features before answering. “No. Why?”

Steve shrugged. “I just sensed some tension is all.”

“Nope, all is fine.” She forced herself to smile at him. “You worry too much, Cap.”

“Yeah,” he grumbled. “Sam tells me that, too.”

•••

Steve didn’t ask her about Sam again. Neither, for the record, did anyone else, and Natasha managed to avoid someone she lived with and trained with on a daily basis as much as she possibly could. Really, it was sort of impressive how easily she managed to do that, considering how much time they _should_ be spending together, just on the basis of their status as teammates.

And then came the mission gone wrong. It was just her and Steve. They had gotten word that a small rogue group of former Hydra agents were planning an attack, and they were supposed to go in, take them out and shut down the warehouse they were operating from.

Except it wasn’t a small group and they’re arrival wasn’t unexpected and not even ten minutes after they arrived, Natasha found herself being buried under the rubble of an exploding building (although the last thing she remembered was taking down six agents with her as she fell).

She woke up on the quinjet with Steve’s worried face hovering above her, his fingers checking her over for broken bones and serious damage.

“I’m okay,” she managed, trying to shove him away from her and testing her body parts one after the other. A sprained wrist and a cracked rib were her determination, and a lot of bruises that were going to leave her very sore for the next few days, but nothing life threatening. “I promise.”

Steve flew them back to the compound, casting furtive glances a mother hen would be proud of every few minutes of their trip.

“I promise,” she reassured him as they walked back inside the compound, greeted only by one light in the kitchen someone had left on before they all went to bed. “I’m going to live.”

“You better,” Steve said, and he glanced her over, from the top of her head down to her boots, one last time before he headed off down the corridor.

Natasha slipped into her own room, not even bothering to turn on the lights. She was fine, just like she had told Steve. She was definitely not dying. But she was exhausted.

She walked into her darkened bedroom and perched at the edge of her bed, carefully removing her boots and her widow’s bites and her holsters and the knives she still had tucked in her sleeves and in the legs of her pants.

She needed to shower, she knew that, but she was so tired, so so tired …

She leaned back on the bed, her eyes already involuntarily closing …. And screamed.

Instead of the soft feel of blankets, there was something hard.

She scrambled for her knives, her mind in a panic, until the sound of laughter broke through her fuzzy thoughts.

She fumbled for the light switch, her deadliest glare already forming, even as her heart felt like it was going to beat out of her chest, but the sight of Sam, lying half naked in her bed and laughing hysterically was enough to stop the anger from really forming.

“What the hell, Sam?” she practically shrieked.

Sam looked like he was going to fall over, he was laughing so hard. “Payback, Natasha Romanoff,” he managed. “Is a bitch.”

She glared this time, but not with the hatred she had originally intended. Sam grinned up at her — and then the grinned vanished.

“You’re hurt,” he said. 

“I’m fine.”

“That’s a weird looking fine.”

She shrugged. “Why are you here anyway?”

“Why?” Sam quirked a brow at her. “Why do you think?”

“I don’t know. It’s why I’m asking.”

“Okay,” he said, “how about because you, my favorite deadly assassin, stopped coming to me.”

“Oh.” Natasha immediately dropped her eyes. So he had noticed.

“And I missed you.”

She looked back up. “What?”

“You heard me.” Sam smiled at her. “I missed you. And you can deny it all you want, but you missed me too.”

Natasha let her lips curve up a little at that. “Maybe,” she admitted.

Sam pushed back the covers that he had been lying beneath and swung his legs off the bed before standing up. Natasha almost felt like she couldn’t breathe as he came around to stand in front of her.

“And,” he said, leaning forward so his lips were just centimeters from hers. Natasha swallowed. “I like you, too.”

Natasha blinked. “Wha …?” But Sam was already shaking his head and taking her hand, leading her into the bathroom.

“Sam?” she asked as she followed. “What are you doing?”

“Turning on the hot water,” he answered. “So we can clean you up and put you in bed, so you can get better, so once you’re better I can ask you out for coffee because Cap is driving me crazy asking me every five minutes why I haven’t asked you yet.”

“You want to ask me out for coffee?” Natasha felt like her head was spinning, like maybe she had taken a blow to the head she didn’t actually remember.

“Yes,” Sam answered. “I figure coffee is a good first date.”

“You want to take me on a date?” Again, she was hearing the words, but they didn’t make sense …

“Yes.” Sam let go of her hand at that and turned, so he could face her. “Don’t freak out on me, okay? It’s just coffee. We can do it in the kitchen. And then if it goes well, you can scare me later in the gym by popping up behind me when I don’t hear you coming. And if it doesn’t go well, you can shock me with your widow’s bite and we’ll never talk about it again.”

Natasha let out a laugh. “I’m not freaking out,” she said. (That was a lie. She was totally freaking out. She hadn’t been on a real date, as _herself_ , in approximately never. But she was never going to admit that. And this was Sam. _Sam_. Who she liked Sam. And he was asking her for coffee and offering her a way out and …)

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’ll have coffee with you.”

“You know that wasn’t me actually asking you. What part of the ‘when you’re better’ did you not get?”

Natasha reached out, shoved him playfully. “Jerk,” she grinned.

“You love me.”

(Yeah. Yeah, she did. Maybe. At least she thought she might. But he didn’t need to know that now. Instead she just slipped down the zipper of her uniform and waited for the obligatory …)

“What the hell, Natasha? We haven’t even kissed up.”

Yup, there it was.

(And that kiss? It happened later that night, when she was tucked against his side, and yeah, it was worth the wait.)


End file.
